Peter Loftus

Right now, you'd have to say Novo Nordisk has the edge.

Their Wegovi pill really has had one of the fastest launches of any drug in pharma history.

They've already had more than a million patients using it just since January, since it came out.

Of course, it did get a head start on Eli Lilly, whose Foundeo came out in April.

But even if you adjust for the timing of the launch, it's clear that the Wegovi pill was doing better.

And there's a couple of reasons for this.

One is that the Wegovy pill showed stronger efficacy in trials than Foundeo did.

And also the Wegovy pill is using this established brand name that we first saw five years ago when the injectable version came out.

Whereas Foundeo is a brand new brand name.

It's less familiar to consumers.

Now, that said, Lilly hasn't really started the consumer promotion like TV ads and more.

And a lot of analysts think that Lilly will have an edge when it comes to rolling this drug out internationally outside the U.S.

and having a big enough supply to be able to meet all that demand.

because it's actually a lot easier for Lilly to make a lot of its pills than it is for Novo Nordisk.

One other interesting aspect for both of these companies is that the pills seem to be expanding the market for weight loss drugs overall, rather than just taking business away from the shots.

And that sort of validates the whole premise that the companies had for developing pills in the first place was they felt there was a large untapped market of people who would just prefer a pill for weight loss.

Yeah, I mean, Lilly's results showed that sales of Monjaro, which is for both diabetes and obesity, more than doubled.

And it's probably on track to being the highest selling drug in the world.

Zepbound, the weight loss version of this in the U.S., was up something like 80%.

There's still an expectation of just strong continued growth for these drugs in both shot and pill form.